Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged is a novel by the American writer Ayn Rand, published in 1957 by Random House. It sets out the story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world and did, and it is built on a large cast of industrialists, inventors and administrators.

The book is long and structured as a sequence of industrial crises, with characters in rail transport, mining and manufacturing whose decisions are treated as the plot. Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is both described and dramatised in the text, which is why the novel is read as a work of argument as much as a work of fiction. It is set in a United States where heavy industry is failing under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations, and the railroad executive Dagny Taggart is one of the people trying to keep the system running.

A 2005 printing marked the author's centennial year, and the novel's length and its use in American political argument have kept it in print continuously since publication. The centennial printing of 2005 is one of several reissues the novel has had, and its length is part of how it is read, since the industrial plot is delivered across more than a thousand pages.